My First Adventures in Windows Land
Thursday, December 14th, 2006It’s been years since I was given the gift of my first compiler by my parents.
It’s been almost as long since I’ve experimented with the Windows API.
Shortly after receiving the gift of Visual Studio 6 I made the switch to Linux as my desktop operating system of choice. Unfortunately this left me with minimal experience with windows programming. To this day the majority of my programming projects and tasks have taken the form of simple 2D graphics engines using SDL, or simple form based applications using QT or GTK+.
Until recently I had always felt like I was missing something, I never had the most basic experience developing applications for the Windows operating system. This always left me with a bit of a pit in my stomach, as I didn’t have the funds required to purchase a copy of Windows, purchase Visual Studio, and begin my experiments anew.
Thankfully I was very recently offered a paid internship position with a company called Railcomm Inc. At Railcomm I was given the opportunity to develop some Windows programming skills. I developed screen after screen of graphical Windows application with relative ease. I considered myself at least a successful basic Windows programmer.
At the start of this project I figured setting up a Window to contain my DirectX 9.0c rendering context would be simple as pie. “It’s only a few function calls” I had been told over and over again. I was sure I’d have no problems at all.
Boy was I wrong.
What follows are the steps I used to learn to develop a “simple” Windows application.
